Various arrangements have long been in use involving the provision of a rotary member, such as a brush, at the front end of road cleaning machines, and the desirable features of such brushes are well recognized. However attempts to utilize a brush or other rotor element at the front end of a machine with a bucket, such as a front end loader, have not been successful owing to the difficulty arising from the complexity of the attachment of the brush to the bucket and time required to accomplish this fixing.
Known brushing apparatus and methods are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,697,846 to Wilcox et al and 4,895,476 to Vangaever. The bucket and brush assembly described by Wilcox does not provide for quick detachment of the bucket from the loader arms. While Vangaever describes a quick release mounting between the bucket and the loader arms, no quick release method is defined between the bucket and the brush assembly. Either of these approaches do allow a loader to be used as a sweeper but neither allows the loader to convert easily from one mode to the other. The attachment between the bucket and the brush must be quick and simple to allow the vehicle to convert from a conventional bucket configuration to a sweeper and back again, allowing the practical use of both functions by one vehicle.